Badass Jesus

This isn't your grandma's Jesus. This book is for those who need a Jesus who was: a fighter a ferocious personality a man of fire and courage a man who had hell in his blood and mad love in his heart. This book is for a rare class of athletes: the fiercest and most intense. It is for the lions, the wild horses, and the badasses, who naturally possess the strongest potential for great leadership. Badass Jesus will powerfully challenge your spirituality. Focused on Jesus' core principle rather than all the differing beliefs of Christian churches, Badass Jesus offers a simple new vision of intense faith: Jesus' ethos of extreme self-sacrifice mixed with his 1st and Greatest Commandments of radical, noble love - all dedicated to serving God and changing the world. Sven Erlandson, M.Div., B.A., is an internationally-respected author, motivational speaker, college religion and athletics lecturer, former college Head Strength & Conditioning Coach, former Division I athlete and record-setting power lifter. He was the first pastor ever in the Lutheran Church to be hired as a full-time Sports and Recreation Pastor. He has worked with thousands of athletes of all levels, as well as coaches, universities, small colleges, churches, pastors and hungry spiritual seekers. Erlandson excels at translating spiritual concepts into the language of athletes and spiritual but not religious people. Most of his time is spent consulting athletes and coaches on maximizing their mental and physical performances. Erlandson literally wrote the book - the very first book - on the spiritual but not religious movement in America, and is credited with coining that term (Spiritual But Not Religious: A Call to Religious Revolution in America). He has also written the critically-acclaimed Rescuing God from Christianity and The 7 Evangelical Myths, as well as numerous articles on spirituality, politics, culture, and parenting. His high-powered and counter-intuitive approach to spiritual life has been inspiring younger generations for years.

This may be the most honest book ever written about Jesus. As a veteran pastor in the United Church of Christ, Dr. Watson shares his thoughts on the timeless topic of Christology--the doctrine of Christ--with new and creative insights, informative and accessible theology, personal anecdotes, and lively wit. Nothing is off-limits in this no-holds-barred contribution to the Jesus genre. Big Jesus is not another theological "spin" on the identity and nature of Jesus of Nazareth, nor is it a sentimental fairytale for those who prefer their Christology to be served up on Sunday mornings with fluffy sheep, little children, and footprints in the sand. This book is for Christian adults with a sense of humor.

This isn't your grandma's Jesus. This book is for those who need a Jesus who was: - a fighter - a ferocious personality - a man of fire and courage - a man who had hell in his blood and mad love in his heart. This book is for a rare class of athletes: the fiercest and most intense. It is for the lions, the wild horses, and the badasses, who naturally possess the strongest potential for great leadership. Badass Jesus will powerfully challenge your spirituality. Focused on Jesus' core principle rather than all the differing beliefs of Christian churches, Badass Jesus offers a simple new vision of intense faith: Jesus' ethos of extreme self-sacrifice mixed with his 1st and Greatest Commandments of radical, noble love - all dedicated to serving God and changing the world

If we can agree on anything, it's that we are not okay. Our culture is reeling from the ravages of a global pandemic, a precipitous rise in depression and anxiety, suffocating debt, white supremacy, hypercapitalism, and a virulent political animus--to name a few. But what if it's not us? What if it's . . . well, everything? What if trying to conform to a sick culture is actually making us sick? It's Not You, It's Everything is a timely and incisive inquiry into the anxious pursuit of happiness at all costs. Psychotherapist and former pastor Eric Minton claims that the pernicious melding of capitalism and Christianity means a world of competition, perfection, and scarcity disguised as self-help and self-care. Rather than shaming, silencing, or medicating away our disappointment at not having obtained the happiness we were promised, however, Minton posits a radical alternative. In an impertinent, droll, yet pastoral voice, Minton suggests that our "not-okayness" will require rethinking everything we thought we knew about God, depression, the economy, culture, education, technology, and happiness. Our angst--and that of our children and teenagers--is telling us the truth about the kind of world we've created. By naming all the ways we're not okay, we move away from fear and shame and toward love, and trust, and trustworthiness. We'll need nothing less than hip-hop, Mr. Rogers, liberation theology, and Jesus to get us there. But on the other side of our pain is a radical "okayness" that might just set us free.

Short. Timely. Poignant. Pointed. Burying White Privilege is all of these and more. This is the book that everybody who cares about contemporary American Christianity will want to read. Many people wonder how white Christians could not only support Donald Trump for president but also rush to defend an accused child molester running for the US Senate. In a 2017 essay that went viral, Miguel A. De La Torre boldly proclaimed the death of Christianity at the hands of white evangelical nationalists. He continues sounding the death knell in this book. De La Torre argues that centuries of oppression and greed have effectively ruined evangelical Christianity in the United States. Believers and clerical leaders have killed it, choosing profits over prophets. The silence concerning—if not the doctrinal justification of—racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia has made white Christianity satanic. Prophetically calling Christian nationalists to repentance, De La Torre rescues the biblical Christ from the distorted Christ of white Christian imagination.

A Tea Party may not sound crazy at first, but once the likes of Ted Cruz, Louie Gohmert, and Steve King show up at the door, it will make any frat party look tame in comparison. This level of craziness is on full display in Craig Rozniecki's twelfth book, LOL at the GOP - Volume 5: You Can't Spell "Forgot To Take Their Crazy Pills" Without "Tea Party." In this book, read all about: One Tea Partier's claim that abortion leads to global warming, Donald Trump's attempt to sue Bill Maher over an orangutan joke, Representative Steve Stockman's endorsement from a dead person, and so much more! Not only that, but this book answers all the tough questions, such as: Does President Obama hate white people, even though he's part white himself?; Did Gandhi carry guns with him on peaceful marches?: Do cookies make up for the stripping of women's rights?; and more!

“How curiously different is this white God from the one preached by Jesus who understood faithfulness by how we treat the hungry and thirsty, the naked and alien, the incarcerated and infirm. This white God of empire may be appropriate for global conquerors who benefit from all that has been stolen and through the labor of all those defined as inferior; but such a deity can never be the God of the conquered.” Echoing James Cone’s 1970 assertion that white Christianity is a satanic heresy, Miguel De La Torre argues that whiteness has desecrated the message of Jesus. In a scathing indictment, he describes how white American Christians have aligned themselves with the oppressors who subjugate the “least of these”—those who have been systemically marginalized because of their race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status—and, in overwhelming numbers, elected and supported an antichrist as president who has brought the bigotry ingrained in American society out into the open. With this follow-up to his earlier Burying White Privilege, De La Torre prophetically outlines how we need to decolonize Christianity and reclaim its revolutionary, badass message. Timid white liberalism is not the answer for De La Torre—only another form of complicity. Working from the parable of the sheep and the goats in the Gospel of Matthew, he calls for unapologetic solidarity with the sheep and an unequivocal rejection of the false, idolatrous Christianity of whiteness.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The “paradigm-influencing” book (Christianity Today) that is fundamentally transforming our understanding of white evangelicalism in America. Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping, revisionist history of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, revealing how evangelicals have worked to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism—or in the words of one modern chaplain, with “a spiritual badass.” As acclaimed scholar Kristin Du Mez explains, the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the centrality of popular culture in contemporary American evangelicalism. Many of today’s evangelicals might not be theologically astute, but they know their VeggieTales, they’ve read John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, and they learned about purity before they learned about sex—and they have a silver ring to prove it. Evangelical books, films, music, clothing, and merchandise shape the beliefs of millions. And evangelical culture is teeming with muscular heroes—mythical warriors and rugged soldiers, men like Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, Mel Gibson, and the Duck Dynasty clan, who assert white masculine power in defense of “Christian America.” Chief among these evangelical legends is John Wayne, an icon of a lost time when men were uncowed by political correctness, unafraid to tell it like it was, and did what needed to be done. Challenging the commonly held assumption that the “moral majority” backed Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Trump in fact represented the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values: patriarchy, authoritarian rule, aggressive foreign policy, fear of Islam, ambivalence toward #MeToo, and opposition to Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community. A much-needed reexamination of perhaps the most influential subculture in this country, Jesus and John Wayne shows that, far from adhering to biblical principles, modern white evangelicals have remade their faith, with enduring consequences for all Americans.